Should one use words or money to foster trust of the other party if no means of enforcing trustworthiness are available? This paper reports an experiment studying the effectiveness of two types of mechanisms for promoting trust: a costly gift and a costless message as well as their mutual...

Experimental evidence suggests the size of the foregone outside option of the first mover does not affect the behavior of the second mover in the lost wallet game. In this paper we experimentally compare the behavior of subjects when they face an outside option with unequal payoffs, i.e., the...

While most of the previous literature interprets trust as an action, we adopt a view that trust is represented by a belief that the other party will return a fair share. The agent’s action is then a commitment device that signals this belief. In this paper we propose and test a conjecture that...

This paper reports an experiment designed to shed light on an empirical puzzle observed by Dufwenberg and Gneezy (2000) that the size of the foregone outside option by the first mover does not affect the behavior of the second mover in a lost wallet game. Our conjecture was that the original...

This paper reports an experiment evaluating the effect of gift giving on building trust in a relationship. We have nested our explorations in the standard version of the investment game. Our gift treatment includes a dictator stage in which the trustee decides whether to give a gift to the...

This paper experimentally investigates whether risk-averse individuals punish less if the outcome of punishment is uncertain than when it is certain. Our design includes three treatments: Baseline in which the one-shot prisoner’s dilemma game is played; Certain Punishment in which the...

This paper reports on an experiment studying the effectiveness of two types of mechanisms for promoting trust: pecuniary and non-pecuniary as well as their mutual interaction. Our data provide evidence that both mechanisms significantly enhance trust in comparison to the standard investment...

This paper explores how information about paired subject's previous action affects one's own behavior in a dictator game. The first experiment puts dictators in two environments where they can either give money to the paired player or take money away from them: one where the recipient is a...

Experimental evidence suggests that the size of the foregone outside option does not affect the behavior of the opponent in a lost wallet and pie sharing games but that it matters in a mini-ultimatum game. In this paper we experimentally test a conjecture that it is the fairness property of the...

Both the law and culture make a central distinction between acts of commission that overturn the status quo and acts of omission that uphold it. In everyday life acts of commission often elicit stronger reciprocal responses than do acts of omission. In this paper we compare reciprocal responses...